After all, it’s kinda simple. What are you doing? Say it in 140 characters or less.

Reply with an @. Direct message with a d.

Keep your links short and tweet.

That’s it.

And yet the usage of Twitter has grown rapidly, even warranting an alltop page. The number of unofficial applications has exploded. They do everything from monitor your stats to organising your feeds into channels. Not to mention the humble RT and the hashtag, which have both been used to spread news about causes simply but effectively.

So to the critics of Twitter’s simplicity, I pose this scenario…

Think back to when you first joined Twitter. It was a completely different concept, right? What can you say in 140 characters?

Imagine that they had thrown all of these features at you – hashtags, retweets, pictures, channels, auto-follows… It’s almost enough to put you off the whole idea. And would you still have wanted to create other features or would you just take it like it is?

Like Flickr, the beauty of Twitter is its simplicity.

And it’s perhaps this simplicity which has let other developers think outside its functions, to develop ways to deliver the services they wanted.